Lately I’ve been by turns baffled and terrified at how fast time is passing. 2022? Shouldn’t that be the title of a sci-fi movie? But here we are, almost a month into that sci-fi year, and I find myself in a weird, reflective mood. The last week or so has been… odd. I feel like the fog in my life has lifted, and I’ve found my blue sky again. Cheesy? Yup. But true. I’ve come to realize I’ve spent the last quite a few years just slogging through life. They’ve been hard years–lost my mom, lost one of my best friends, watched my husband suffer through multiple painful surgeries, and kept on truckin’. That’s what I do–I put my head down and keep going–but sometimes I’m so busy doing that, I don’t realize I’ve left a part of myself behind in the bottom of a musty box somewhere. Last week, I opened the box. For the first time in a good while, I feel like I’m doing more than putting one foot in front of the other. Let’s hope it lasts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
OK, enough self-indulgent philosophizing about the state of my life. You’ll get your laughs this week, I promise. But before that happens: Welcome to the Weekend Coffee Share, hosted by Natalie the Explorer<\/a>. Natalie has some wonderful pix of Toronto in winter this week–head on over and take a look!<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n So… January. In addition to spending way too much time in my own head, I found some time to read and write. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I didn’t go anywhere in January–except work and my neighborhood, and I doubt you want pictures of either of those–so we’ll move on to:<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you know me in real life, you know I have eclectic taste in music. I’ll always adore 80s metal, but I listen to other stuff too. I firmly believe life should come with a soundtrack. As a writer, I wish I could include more music in my books, but it’s difficult and sometimes expensive to get permission to use copyrighted lyrics in books, so the standard advice is, don’t. I had to rewrite a whole scene once I learned that fact. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Lyrics that are out of copyright (pre-1923, I believe) are fair game though. My time travel romance (the one I’m hoping to query after one more editing pass) includes a scene set in 1910, in which the female main character (who’s from present day) meets her time-traveling lover’s family. After some awkward conversation, they end up gathered around the piano for a singalong. The song I chose is an old gospel song, “Will the Circle be Unbroken.” I’ve always loved that song, and I heard it in a caf\u00e9 in Flagstaff when I was writing the novel, and it seemed to fit my fictional situation perfectly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Probably the best-known recorded versions of the song are by the Carter Family and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, but tons of artists have performed it. I’ll share a few of my favorite versions here, all courtesy of that great cultural archive known as YouTube. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Here’s Joan Baez: <\/p>\n\n\n\nWriting News<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Books read in January<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Music of the Week<\/h2>\n\n\n\n